Can use of an online plagiarism-detection system reduce plagiarism in student research papers? The paper

“Plagiarism and Technology: A Tool for Coping with Plagiarism” (Journal of Education for Business [2005]:

149–152) describes a study in which randomly selected research papers submitted by students during five semesters were analyzed for plagiarism. For each paper, the percentage of plagiarized words in the paper was determined by an online analysis. In each of the five semesters, students were told during the first two class meetings that they would have to submit an electronic version of their research papers and that the papers would be reviewed for plagiarism. Suppose that the number of papers sampled in each of the five semesters and the means and standard deviations for percentage of plagiarized words are as given in the accompanying table. For purposes of this exercise, assume that the conditions necessary for the ANOVA F test are reasonable. Do these data provide evidence to support the claim that mean percentage of plagiarized words is not the same for all five semesters? Test the appropriate hypotheses using a 5 .05.

Semester n Mean Standard deviation 1 39 6.31 3.75 2 42 3.31 3.06 3 32 1.79 3.25 4 32 1.83 3.13 5 34 1.50 2.37